How adjectives work
What’s wrong with this claim?
It’s a ridiculous childish lie, that’s what. “Trans” is not an adjective like “tall” or “French.” It’s not even an adjective, in fact. It’s just a negation. It could be replaced with “not.” (“Not” is not an adjective.)
Trans is not a kind of woman, trans is a sneaky word that people use to pretend that sex is as fungible as length of hair or favorite color.
So, yes, actually, trans women are indeed a separate category that exists outside of womanhood. (Do we know what category that is? Why yes. The category is men. All trans women are men by definition.)
After spending years of my life debating creationists, as well as new-agers and religious nutters in general, I thought I had seen all the worst arguments humanity could possibly have to offer. I stand corrected. TRAs are by far the worst debaters I have ever seen. No wonder they insist on “no debate”, when their only other option is to fight unarmed. Considering the weakness of their case, religious apologists, and even creationists, are probably doing the best job they can do (remember the bacterial flagellum?). The TRAs make them look like Albert Einstein.
As I have previously mentioned, in my militant atheist and skeptic days, I never heard a single argument for the existence of God that gave me pause. They were all exactly what I for one would expect from people who had no rational reasons what so ever to believe as they did, but were non the less determined to believe it anyway and justify it to themselves somehow. But by far the worst arguments were the ones that tried to derive a strong conclusion about external reality from whatever arbitrary words and labels humans have invented to talk about it, e.g.:
Or:
Even most of the religious nutters I have debated had too much sense to try something like that. It doesn’t bode well for TRAs that this kind of word-magic is apparently the best they can do. I guess this is where you end up once you go down the postmodernist path of conflating language and reality.
Of course there are a whole class of adjectives that entail negation of the noun. Fake, ersatz, pretend, wannabe…. Along with others that in some contexts have such an entailment (a wooden soldier is no soldier).
True, true.
But I think I stand by the claim that “not” is not an adjective.
The word “ersatz” doesn’t get used enough. I think we should use it more.
@1 I found it interesting that Judith Butler was trained in Talmudic practice – there is a lot in Jewish doctrine and mysticism about how language creates the world (which also became part of Christianity – And God said, Let there be light: and there was light). Another way in which gender ideology reflects not only religion in general but specifically Judeo-Christian doctrine.
Ophelia,
Sorry, I wasn’t quibbling with you, but rather with people who think that adjectives and other modifiers merely categorize.
And I’ll join you on the ersatz bandwagon.
No need to be sorry! It’s a nice eloquent comment.
Also it’s a pleasing philosophical question whether it’s possible to join anyone on an ersatz bandwagon. Heehee.
Does an ersatz bandwagon have square wheels?
I thought of putting ersatz in quotation marks, but I liked the ambiguity.